Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 5

Note: evolutionary psychology explanations of Mind and happiness are false. So be careful listening to scientists and academics opine on such matters from an evolutionary psychology/Darwinian lens. Evolutionary psychology is ultimately wrong.

More Mormon self-deception.

Atheism is epistemically circular and irrational. Here's how:

An atheist starts by assuming that God is a silly idea held by dumb, indoctrinated, irrational people. Then, any time this atheist encounters talk of God, he sees the person talking about God as dumb, indoctrinated, and irrational. His mind is too closed to imagine the possibility that some of the people talking about God are not dumb, indoctrinated, nor irrational, but actually speaking truth from direct experience. So any argument the atheist hears from anybody talking to him about God is interpreted by the atheist as coming from an obviously irrational person. The atheist therefore never takes seriously any arguments or explanations of God because obviously they must be false since God cannot be real. So every discussion of God the atheist hears further validates in his mind that he is right and that God is silly and irrational. This reaches such a degree of circularity that even if the atheist ever experiences God first-hand, for himself, he will dismiss the experience as madness, mental illness, or hallucination — because obviously God cannot be real. The atheist is willing to accept anything before accepting that God is real — including his own madness.

In this way atheism becomes an self-sealing epistemic bubble which feels completely real and rational from inside the atheist’s mind, but has no reality whatsoever. It never occurs to the atheist to go back and doubt or question his original assumption. It never occurs to the atheist that his initial assumption is shaping how he sees and interprets all evidence and arguments for God. If you assume God is silly, irrational, unscientific, and impossible, then any evidence or argument you encounter for God will be interpreted by your mind as silly, irrational, unscientific, and impossible. To escape this self-reinforcing epistemic trap you must gain enough consciousness and objectivity to see that whether God exists or not is an open, empirical question. Whether God is unscientific or irrational must be seen as a legitimate open question, not assumed! But atheists do not have enough epistemic objectivity to see the question that way. They just assume that God is impossible. From there, all their thinking and interpretation is confirmation biased. Ironically, this entire epistemic mechanism of atheism is irrational, since it is irrational to not objectively question one’s metaphysical assumptions and to trust interpretations based on unproven assumptions.

The solution to this problem is to be truly neutral and unbiased about your starting assumptions. You cannot start inquiry by assuming that God is a silly thing. You have to treat it seriously, otherwise you are introducing prejudice into inquiry. You have be seriously open to the possibility that the person you're speaking to understands reality better than you, even though from your POV the person seems irrational. You have to take seriously the possibility that people seem irrational to you not because they are irrational, but because you are projecting your irrationality onto them.

Grasp this doozy: If you are irrational, rational people who try to talk you out of your irrationality will seem irrational to you while you feel rational to yourself.

Irrational people do not feel irrational to themselves, they feel rational to themselves. And to them, rational people feel irrational. So you cannot avoid irrationality in this simple-minded way that atheists attempt. As an atheist you should be skeptical of your own claims to rationality. After all, how do you know your mind isn't tricking you into believing that you are rational when you aren't? Why don't you doubt whether your mind is portraying your own rationality accurately to you? See, the atheist is actually a piss-poor skeptic. Because a serious skeptic would doubt his own rationality. Of course this is something atheists never do. Atheists just assume that atheism is rational. No. It isn't. There is nothing rational about being epistemically prejudiced. That's what atheism boils down to: prejudice against a certain kind of worldview. This is why you cannot talk an atheist out of his worldview. Because it was a prejudice from the start. Talking people out of atheism is like talking people out of racism. You can't do it because they will never even admit they are prejudiced. To them their prejudice just feels like objective reality. A Nazi genuinely feels that whites are objectively superior to blacks and Jews. And an atheist genuinely feels that God is impossible. There's no solution to this level of pigheadedness.

See, a hardcore atheist reading this post will interpret it as a post written by an irrational, unscientific, delusional, indoctrinated, religious excuse-maker. That's what happens when you assume you're smarter than everyone else. As it turns out, atheism is smarter than fundamentalist religion, but it is not as smart as mysticism. The atheist is so fixated on the first part of that statement to the exclusion of the second.

If you care about truth, you have to actually take seriously the possibility that you are wrong. There is an even deeper, broader circularity at work here, which is this: Your mind assumes that it's right. Then your mind look out at the world and interprets everything you see to fit the idea that you are right. Any point where you are wrong, your mind dismisses as wrong because your mind always assumes you're right. And so in this way you always feel like you're right, simply because your mind is blind to all the ways you are wrong by assuming everyone pointing out your wrongness is wrong.

"But Leo! What about you? Why don't you assume that you're wrong?" I already did. I used to be an atheist. How do you think I broke free? By taking seriously the possibility that I was wrong.

I consider that I'm wrong all the time. So much so that it would it sicken most people. You think I reached my position by believing? NO! I got here by doubting. God is realized by doubt, not belief. When you doubt all human ideas to death, the end result is God. The problem with the atheist is that he's a shitty, prejudiced doubter, and too epistemically unconscious to understand it — and anyone who comes along to correct him in this matter, he will dismiss as an irrational religious idiot. This is called biting the hand that feeds you.

The most important aspect of my work is to set the highest quality standard for what philosophical and spiritual work is. So that no ideology, no fantasy, no human bias, no bullshit, no diversions infect the work. To uphold the highest epistemic standard. To demand real questioning of reality, not group-think and human games. That’s the greatest value I offer. To teach you serious inquiry.

See, I am one of a handful of people on this planet who understands what real philosophical and spiritual work entails. That is exceptionally rare. Who understands the depth of the illusion we're dealing with? Just to understand the real work from the bullshit work, is the greatest lesson. I don’t want to teach you some practical answers to your life’s problems. That’s nothing. I want to teach you what real intellectual work means, the attitude of hardcore epistemic rigor that cuts through all human illusions, constructions, fantasies, and self-deceptions.

Nobody is teaching you how to think deeply about reality. Nobody is even articulating the proper standard. 95% of spiritual, philosophical, and intellectual work is human bullshit. What does real intellectual work mean? How is reality to be made sense of?

There is such a staggering amount of illusion and group-think in all intellectual work. And it's just settled-for and accepted by mankind — business as usual. My job is to not settle for any of it, because all of it obscures your ability to understand reality. My job is even just to tell you that understanding reality is the goal. Even that, nobody tells you. Nobody is even conscious enough to properly articulate the goal. That's how fucking lost people are. People don't even understand which way is North. What the fuck is life about? Scientists, academics, excepts, PhD's, philosophers, public intellectuals could not tell you. That's how lost they are.

Life is about realizing that you are an Infinite Mind imagining the world. This is the goal! Everything else is nonsense and I will not have it. And my job is to show you that you shouldn't have it either. Stop settling for human bullshit. Your proper job is to understand that you are an Infinite Mind. You're going to spend the rest of your doing that.

My job is to show you intellectual True North. Until you can find it on your own.

Note: Part of the reason I'm saying this is to clarify for myself what my job is. Because it's easy to get distracted. It's a good habit to ask yourself, What is the actual value I offer the world?

The masculine has advantages in pursuing truth over the feminine. This sounds sexist, but here's why it is the case:

• The masculine cares more about abstract things than people and relationships. You're never going to find truth in the social domain. You need to care about truth more than you care about people and relationships.
• It's easier for the masculine to be ruthless, cold, and detached. This is critical for truth-seeking. Truth must be prioritized over feelings. Cutting through illusions and fantasies is ruthless business akin to war.
• The masculine depends less on social relations for survival. Truth-seeking requires breaking free of social survival, which is harder for the feminine to do.
• The masculine is less dominated by emotions and feelings. It is impossible to do truth-seeking if you are overly emotional and moody. High femininity is simply too moody and unstable to do serious truth-seeking. Just hormonally, the masculine is more stable than the feminine. Truth-seeking requires stability.
• The masculine needs less emotional support. You will not have emotional support when doing serious truth-seeking. The feminine is accustomed to seeking emotional support from others. This is a luxury when it comes to truth-seeking. No one is going to hold your hand through existential self-annihilation.
• The masculine is better at enduring self-inflicted suffering. Truth-seeking is self-inflicted suffering. Think of the Buddha sitting under the tree for two weeks. I'm trying to think of what woman I know who would voluntarily do this.
• The masculine has better self-discipline. Self-discipline is critical for truth-seeking.
• The masculine prefers to lead rather than follow. Leading favors truth-seeking. Following favors illusion. You are not going to follow your way into deep truth.
• The masculine is less agreeable, which is necessary to break down social conventions. Truth favors intellectual disagreeableness. Needing social approval is death to truth-seeking.
• And cultural norms reinforce all the above.
• At the risk of oversimplification, truth-seeking requires big balls. But then again, some women have more balls than some men.

There is no reason why the masculine and feminine should have equal access to truth.

None of this is to say that most men are truthful or that women cannot do truth-seeking. Overall, hardcore truth-seeking is going to align better with the masculine. And the hardcore part is important because truth is hardcore. Truth-seeking has to be hardcore because it requires self-annihilation. Feminine versions of spirituality are usually not hardcore enough to break through Maya because Maya is so powerful.

This is why — traditionally — monks, hermits, ascetics, sages, yogis, philosophers, and prophets have been men. A woman can do it, but it suits feminine women less, for the same reason that chess, computer programming, and engineering suits feminine women less. Women can serve in these roles but these roles require women to take on a masculine disposition, which most young women will not be happy with.

The point is that this issue is more than cultural, more than social construction. The biology and therefore the psychology of men and women is different. It's not good or bad, it just is what it is. And you will find handfuls of individual exceptions.

Watching this mini-show. It's great.

I learned to play chess when I was 5 years old. Russians.

What upset me the most is if my dad lost on purpose. Truth.